When comparing Tower 2 vs GitHub Desktop, the Slant community recommends Tower 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for macOS?”Tower 2 is ranked 8th while GitHub Desktop is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Tower 2 is:

T2 has a good-looking interface and consists of 3 main views - services, repositories and repository.
- Services view for managing integrations with hosting services like GitHub, Bitbucket and Beanstalk.
- Repositories view for organizing local and remote repositories into folders and getting general overview about them.
- Repo view that consists of two main subviews:
- Working copy view shows modified files and their diff and allows wrapping up changes in a commit.
- History shows commits alongside metadata and projects file structure.
Additionally, it allows performing various tasks such as merging branches via drag & drop, search allows searching by message, commit hash, author, committer and file and there's a quick open that allows fuzzy-searching for folder names.

Pros

Pro

Pretty, modern-looking user interface

T2 has a good-looking interface and consists of 3 main views - services, repositories and repository.

Services view for managing integrations with hosting services like GitHub, Bitbucket and Beanstalk.

Repositories view for organizing local and remote repositories into folders and getting general overview about them.

Repo view that consists of two main subviews:

Working copy view shows modified files and their diff and allows wrapping up changes in a commit.

History shows commits alongside metadata and projects file structure.

Additionally, it allows performing various tasks such as merging branches via drag & drop, search allows searching by message, commit hash, author, committer and file and there's a quick open that allows fuzzy-searching for folder names.

Pro

Offers a visual way to solve conflicts

T2 shows conflicting files, their authors and the commit that made changes. It then allows selecting which files should be used in the final result.

Pro

Git-flow integration

Git-flow provide a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. T2 allows setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.

Pro

Fetches remotes at regular intervals

See what colleages or other contributors are doing in order to perform merges.

Pro

Great GitHub integration

This is the official GitHub desktop client built by the GitHub team.

Pro

Simple, streamlined GUI

GitHub Desktop uses an extremely simplistic two-panel view. It's not capable of complex historical visualisations like other GUIs, but it is very easy to use (especially for git novices).

Pro

Supports pull requests

In addition to being able to seamlessly and easily integrate with all of GitHub's features, it also supports forking and submitting pull requests on any open source project hosted on GitHub.

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Cons

Con

Expensive

Costs $79 USD.

Con

It requires separate licenses for MacOS and Windows

Usually a lot of products that are on MacOS and Windows let you use the same license for both platforms. Tower forces you to pay two licences if you are in this case (the unique benefit is a 20% of discount on the second platform).

Con

Inefficient UI

In order to not overwhelm the users with information, much of the information is either hidden by default or requires navigating to a different section to access.

Con

Doesn't support subtrees

Con

Unable to add custom parameters for git commands

The inability to add default custom parameters for git commands is a read deal breaker. Imagine that you want to add --no-force-with-lease to push command but this is impossible with Tower because it does not allow you to configure extra parameters for git commands.

Con

Limited

Can't handle complex tasks. The Help Manual advises to use command-line Git instead.

Con

Buggy

Poster child for authors' programming ideology (FRP), likely the cause for the odd quirks and bugs it has.

Con

Not free/libre

This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified or freely distributed.

Con

Non-GitHub repositories are not fully supported

Since this is mainly a GitHub client, other repositories are not fully supported and with as many features and setting up a repo hosted anywhere else but GitHub is troublesome.

Con

Does not support multiple Remotes for a repo

Only allowed to assign one URL as remote. To manage/sync/fetch other remotes, use command-line Git instead.

Con

No Linux support

There's no Linux version of this client.

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